Nonviolence and Community: Reflections on the Alternatives to Violence Project

Synopsis

Nonviolence requires a spirit that comes from within which no curriculum can create or implant. The authors describe how the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) organizes experiences to draw forth that spirit and how doing so builds supportive community.

About the Author(s)

Newton Garver’s and Eric Reitan’s pamphlet Nonviolence and Community: Reflections on the Alternatives to Violence Project, published by Pendle Hill, 1995, presents the key features used in workshops by the Alternatives to Violence Project to train people, primarily prisoners, in the use of nonviolent conflict resolution techniques. In addition to this work, Garver also wrote extensively on Wittgenstein. His publications in 2005 include Wittgenstein & Approaches to Clarity (Humanity Books) and a collection of topical essays, Limits to Power: Some Friendly Reminders (Center Working Papers). The first of these books concludes with an essay comparing Wittgenstein and George Fox, first presented at Pendle Hill in 2001. Garver’s road to the study of Philosophy included burning his draft card in 1947 and serving “a year and a day” sentence for refusing to register for the draft. He took that time off from Swarthmore College where he had been studying philosophy. Although he had lived with Friends since the mid 1940s, he only became a member of the Religious Society while attending Ithaca Meeting in 1956. He began teaching at the University of Buffalo in 1961. This concentration on philosophy and action gave Garver a unique perspective from which to analyze the work of Friends, and he hoped later to publish Wittgenstein for Quakers to stimulate new understanding of that thinker’s work. His pamphlet, Jesus, Jefferson, and the Task of Friends (PHP #250), addresses the relationship between politics and religion and fleshes out the grey area between religious ideas of social justice and political power.

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